Fauci's personal COVID diaries show an obsession with celebrity while Americans died by the thousands

Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul has released Dr. Anthony Fauci's private diary entries from the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pages read less like a public-health leader's war journal than a celebrity's scrapbook.

The diary entries, published by Paul's committee ahead of Fauci's subpoenaed Senate testimony, capture the former White House COVID advisor tallying media mentions, marveling at his own fame, and noting that Secret Service agents waved him through White House security without checking his ID. On the same pages where Fauci recorded those details, he also jotted down death tolls, nearly 98,000 worldwide and more than 27,000 in the United States as of around May 21, 2020.

The contrast between the two subjects, fame and mass death, sits at the center of the diary package Fox News reported Paul released days before Fauci is scheduled to appear under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The full diary PDF is hosted on Paul's Senate website. And the entries raise a pointed question: Was the man steering America's pandemic response more focused on the spotlight than on the crisis?

April 2020: "Press still hot and heavy about me"

The earliest diary excerpt dates to April 7, 2020. COVID-19 was tearing through New York City. Hospitals were running out of ventilators. Morgue trucks lined the streets. Fauci's entry that day opened not with case counts or hospital capacity but with media attention.

"Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me."

By roughly May 21, 2020, Fauci's self-assessment had escalated. He described his "national and international fame" as "explosive and really unimaginable." He called it "not hyperbole" to say he was "the most famous and talked about person in the country." He catalogued profiles written about him, "countless," in his own word, and noted that several had been published without even interviewing him.

He also turned his attention to the president. Fauci wrote that Trump "seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him," and described their dynamic as "a very unique and interesting relationship." At the same time, White House communications officials had begun restricting Fauci's television appearances. Fauci wrote that officials were upset because coverage made it appear he was becoming "a star that outshines" the president.

Fauci insisted in the diary that he had "no desire to conflict with, embarrass or show up the POTUS." He wrote that he eventually decided to stop participating in profile interviews altogether. But the volume of diary ink devoted to tracking his own media profile, while tens of thousands of Americans were dying, speaks for itself.

Record case counts and a "Dancing with the Stars" invite arrived the same month

Roughly a month after the May 21 entry, Fauci recorded that the United States had just hit a record 40,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day. In the same stretch of diary pages, he noted something else: he had been invited to appear on "Dancing with the Stars."

By July 2, 2020, Fauci was warning in his diary that the country could be heading into an "exponential" increase in cases as the Fourth of July weekend approached. His assessment of the White House response was blunt.

"POTUS and his people have essentially dropped out and do not even recognize that an outbreak is ongoing."

Three weeks later, on July 23, 2020, Fauci threw the ceremonial first pitch at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., before a game between the New York Yankees and Washington Nationals. The moment became one of the most photographed images of the pandemic summer, another entry in the celebrity ledger Fauci was keeping so carefully in private.

Paul's subpoena puts Fauci back under oath

The diary release is not an isolated act. Paul, a longtime Fauci critic, subpoenaed the former NIAID director to testify before his committee about COVID-19's origins, gain-of-function research funding, and allegations that Fauci misled Congress. Fauci's testimony is scheduled for days after the diary package went public.

Paul has made clear he expects little candor from the witness. In a Fox Business Network appearance, the senator laid out his expectations plainly.

"I expect he will not tell the truth. I expect him to dissemble. I expect him to filibuster. But I don't expect him to be honest. He has not been honest in the last six years."

Paul also stated he has evidence that Fauci destroyed records and encouraged others to do the same, a claim that, if substantiated under oath, would represent a serious escalation beyond the gain-of-function dispute that has defined their years-long confrontation.

The gain-of-function question remains central. Fauci told Congress on May 11, 2021, that "the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." Months later, in a July 2021 hearing, he doubled down: "Sen. Paul, I have never lied before the Congress. And I do not retract that statement." But by October 2021, the NIH itself admitted that U.S. taxpayer funds had in fact financed gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. A previously unpublished EcoHealth grant proposal revealed $599,000 in NIH funding designated for research designed to make viruses more dangerous or more infectious.

In that same November 2021 hearing, Paul confronted Fauci directly over the contradiction. "What you're doing is defining away gain-of-function," Paul told him. "You're simply saying it doesn't exist because you changed the definition on the NIH website." Fauci fired back: "If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you." The AP documented the exchange as the latest in a series of confrontations between the two over COVID-19 origins.

Declassified intelligence files have since added weight to Paul's side of the argument. Declassified DNI documents revealed that a whistleblower complaint was filed alleging Fauci lied to Congress about gain-of-function research funding, a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Those same files showed Fauci met with CIA officials on June 4, 2021, just weeks after his congressional denial, and steered the intelligence community's focus away from the lab-leak theory toward a Wuhan wet market explanation, as the New York Post reported when the subpoena was issued. Separately, declassified documents released by DNI Tulsi Gabbard alleged Fauci actively steered intelligence agencies away from the lab-leak theory.

Fauci once wrote that pandemic risk was "worth" the knowledge

Paul has framed the stakes in the starkest possible terms. He estimates approximately 15 million people died worldwide as a potential consequence of the decision to fund research in Wuhan. "He thinks that the knowledge is worth the risk," Paul said of Fauci, "and I think the lives of 15 million people who died, approximately, would counter that."

That characterization is not invented. Fauci himself wrote in a 2011 opinion piece that even if a pandemic resulted from gain-of-function research, "the knowledge is worth the risk." Paul has cited that line repeatedly, and in a Newsmax interview called the research "incredibly dangerous" and compared Fauci to "Dr. Frankenstein."

"Anthony Fauci has argued, well, if you don't know in advance they're going to gain in function, then you can't really call it gain of function," Paul told Newsmax. "But they did know, and they continued to do these experiments in Wuhan."

The broader pattern of internal doubt about the official narrative has grown harder to dismiss. Slack messages released by Paul's committee showed that authors of a key paper on COVID-19's origins privately doubted their own published conclusions, raising further questions about whether the scientific establishment closed ranks to protect Fauci's position rather than pursue the truth.

The death toll versus the diary

The total pandemic toll now stands at more than 7 million officially reported COVID-19 deaths worldwide and approximately 1.2 million in the United States alone. Those numbers dwarf the celebrity milestones Fauci was logging in his diary, the "Dancing with the Stars" invitation, the Secret Service agents who knew him by sight, the "countless" magazine profiles.

Paul released the diary entries not as a curiosity but as evidence of a mindset. A public-health official entrusted with guiding a nation through its worst health crisis in a century spent page after page measuring his own star power. He tracked media hits the way a publicist would. He weighed his relationship with the president in terms of who was getting more attention. And he did it while Americans were dying at a rate that, by his own diary entries, he understood perfectly well.

Fauci will soon sit before Paul's committee under oath. He will face questions about gain-of-function funding, record destruction, and whether he misled Congress. But the diary entries pose a simpler, harder question, one that does not require a lawyer to parse.

When the country needed a doctor, it got a man counting his press clippings.